Eva Wiseman’s dark but hopeful YA novels have explored the terrible legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary, the country of her birth. With Puppet, she takes readers to an earlier period in Hungary’s troubled history to explore the deeply racist attitudes that made the attempted genocide of the European Jews a near inevitablity.

The time is 1882 in the bucolic village of Tisza-Eszlar, where 14-year-old Julie, the de facto head of her household since her mother fell sick with cancer, struggles to protect her younger sister from poverty and their alcoholic father’s rage. Julie is aware of the racial divide that separates her family and friends from the village’s Jewish minority, but the two groups have worked and lived side by side for so long that she rarely gives the Catholic villagers’ occasional anti-Semitic remarks a second thought. That all changes when her best friend Esther goes missing and the villagers, enouraged by two corrupt investigating officers, blame her disappearance on a group of Jewish men, who are formally charged with murdering the girl to use her blood for the Passover celebration.

Puppet is loosely based on Europe’s last “blood libel” trial, during which a Jewish teenager, Morris Scharf, was brutally coerced into testifying against his father, the synagogue’s beadle, and four other Jewish men. Wiseman relies on a few too many coincidences and plot twists to place Julie in proximity to the novel’s main events, but most readers will gladly overlook the tinkering, especially in the riveting trial scenes. Julie’s relationship with the shattered Morris Scharf is a compelling portrait of confusion, empathy, and repulsion, one that adds a necessary human touch to a trial that epitomized the institutional dehumanization of an entire population.